February 16, 2018

With tremendous sadness, I have learned that a mother and her two children lost their lives in the Meriç (Evros) River while fleeing Turkey in order to escape persecution by tyrants in their home country.

February 15, 2018

Member of European Parliament Rebecca Harms, on a visit to Georgia to lobby for Mustafa Cabuk’s asylum in Georgia, visited Cabuk in prison. Prior to her visit, GEORGIA TODAY met her for an exclusive interview.

February 10, 2018

Turkish police on Friday detained 7 people, including two academics and three doctors, for watching a video of a speech by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen on their mobile phones in a car in Adıyaman province, pro-government Hürriyet daily reported.

The Turkish Nizamiye Hospital, Abuja, has visited the Junior Day Secondary School, Jiwa, a suburb in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, with a team of doctors, nurses and other auxiliary staff for a medical outreach programme tagged “Reaching out to the Unreached”.

February 9, 2018

Almost every member of the Gülen movement, who has been exposed to a witch-hunt around the world by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government led by Turkish autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has a different dramatic story. Almost every family has tragedies that could be a movie or a novel.

February 8, 2018

The case over the alleged media structure of the Gülen movement regarding 29 journalists on trial has eventually come to the decision stage. Among the jailed journalists only veteran journalist İbrahim Balta was released following the latest hearing at İstanbul’s 25th High Criminal Court on the grounds of his health conditions. During these hearing the prosecutor explained the opinion over his accusations.

February 6, 2018

The criminal investigations, prosecutions and trials in politically motivated cases on trumped-up terrorism and coup plotting charges have ruined the lives of some 1 million people in Turkey, a country that is run by fanatical Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has declared war on a civic group popularly known as the Gülen movement.

February 5, 2018

Zabit Kişi, who was one of the two Turkish nationals who were abducted from a plane in Kazakhstan in mid-September 2017, was formally arrested by a Turkish court in Kocaeli province on Monday over his alleged links to the Gülen movement.

February 4, 2018

Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) has removed from its Islamic Encyclopedia content by some scholars are affiliated with the Gulen movement, according to theology professor Ayhan Tekines.

February 3, 2018

There is an ongoing suppression of dissidents following the attempted coup of July 15, 2016. The state of emergency and the decree laws pave the way for discrimination and segregation on the basis of ethnicity, religion, and political or other opinions. Women and children are discriminated and segregated on the basis of their identity or the identity of their family members and parents. Ordinary citizens including, women, men, children, elderly, and disabled people face discrimination based on physical or mental disability, birth registration, place of residence, social segregation, gender or health, and sometimes a combination of these reasons.

February 1, 2018

The July 15, 2016, failed military coup in Turkey, among others, has accelerated and strengthened the Erdoğan regime’s authoritarianism (albeit the democratic aspiration reflected in the people’s resistance against the coup), a process that was set in motion in the aftermath of the December 2013 corruption revelations about the regime. Turkey has been transformed into a state under one-man rule.

January 30, 2018

Australian Relief Organisation has formed a trilateral alliance with Cambodian Government agencies, including the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Rural Development, and Mekong Charity to deliver healthcare projects in Cambodia. Through such partnership, ARO aims to establish or improve working conditions of 5 health clinics and reach out to 15,000 locals by 2020.

January 29, 2018

Turkish government has pursued an aggressive policy to silence its perceived enemies in at least 46 countries across four continents, as part of its post-coup crackdown, a Foreign Affairs article noted Monday.

January 28, 2018

21 Georgian NGOs have recently signed a joint statement addressing the President of Georgia, with a request to grant refugee status to Mustafa Emre Çabuk and his family, with the statement being published on Georgian Young Lawyer's Association website.

January 27, 2018

The founder of Turkey’s biggest mining company Akin Ipek has launched legal action against a Turkish state fund in the latest stage of his battle for control of London-based assets, a spokesman for the British subsidiary said.

January 26, 2018

Enes Kanter has been wonderful for the New York Knicks. Traded from the Thunder for Carmelo Anthony in the offseason, he’s seen more opportunities to become the player we always knew he could be. But the trade to NYC was just the second biggest story of Kanter’s offseason.

January 25, 2018

If a person is to realize the true meaning intended by the creation of the human, they must come under the command of the heart and listen to the spirit, in spite of the body (humanity’s animal side) and worldly reason. It is possible to evaluate Fethullah Gülen’s approach and considerations about the heart and its spiritual life within the frame of two main facts. The first relates to his views about the Spiritual Intellect (latifa al-rabbaniya), or, which, in his own words, is an “expression of the spiritual existence of the human.” He essentially states his opinions about the matter in the four-volume series Emerald Hills of the Heart, and we will discuss this work in later chapters.

January 24, 2018

An unexpected flurry of activity took place inside a house in Lahore’s Wapda Town on September 27, 2017. At the unearthly hour of 2:25 am, about 12 men in plain clothes barged in, got hold of the people living inside, covered their heads, bundled them into a car and sped away. Those abducted included Mesut Kacmaz, a Turkish citizen living and working in Pakistan as a director at the PakTurk International Schools and Colleges, his wife and two children.

January 22, 2018

Enes Kanter is not only the top earning Turkish professional basketball player but also the most expensive sports transfer in Turkish history. He plays for the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

January 21, 2018

His name is Fethullah Gülen, and for many years, he was a rarity. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, there were few—if any—Muslim Clerics who would have spoken well of the progressive values of the Western world. Gülen was one of them, and remains a staunch advocate for interfaith dialogue and tolerance.

January 20, 2018

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chief advisor, Mehmet Uçum, has said the Turkish state can apologize to the victims of a post-coup era purge and witch-hunt targeting the faith-based Gülen movement years after the events take place, as Australia did for the Aborigines, the US did for the Native Americans and Turkey did for the Armenians.

January 19, 2018

Turkey’s propaganda justifying its mass detentions and torture of followers of the Gulen movement as part of a counter-terrorism effort is being thoroughly discredited on multiple fronts. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch launched its 2018 World Report, documenting the rise in Turkey of allegations of torture in police custody, and the country’s widespread misuse of counter-terrorism laws.

January 18, 2018

New York-based international human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW), has highlighted worsening situation with regards to human rights, rule of law, freedom of expression, association and assembly, press freedom as well as torture and ill-treatment in police custody, resumption of conflict and crackdown on Kurdish opposition in Turkey in its “World Report” for the year of 2017 and underlined that “prosecutions of individuals charged with F..Ö membership often lacked compelling evidence of criminal activity.”

January 17, 2018

The United States celebrates a national holiday today in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement. On this day, we celebrate the civil rights movement and its leaders who fought for equality for all without resorting to violence.

January 16, 2018

The world’s largest Muslim movement is in crisis. Tens of thousands of supporters of the vast international network led by Islamic theologian and philosopher Fethullah Gülen languish in prisons in Turkey and other countries. Gülen himself faces extradition to Turkey from the US to face charges of subversion if Washington accedes to the Turkish request. Ankara is now linking the release of American Pastor Andrew Brunson, imprisoned on trumped-up terrorism and espionage charges, with Gülen’s extradition.

January 15, 2018

İsmail Hakkı Pekin, a former intelligence chief of the Turkish General Staff, has suggested that Turkey make use of tactics it used against Armenian militant group the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and those employed by Israeli intelligence agency MOSSAD against Nazis in order to assassinate followers of the faith-based Gülen movement abroad.

January 12, 2018

On Thursday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that his country will no longer facilitate US extradition requests until Washington hands over US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan says the cleric is a "terrorist" and holds him responsible for orchestrating a failed coup attempt in Turkey in 2016.

January 8, 2018

European governments’ increased scrutiny of Turkish imams who were dispatched by Ankara to serve diaspora groups amid embarrassing revelations of pervasive and unlawful profiling and espionage activities in Turkish mosques has forced the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change tactics and adopt a new scheme to mobilize diaspora groups.

January 7, 2018

It is a difficult global moment for the Hizmet movement, the civil service group inspired by the ideas of Fethullah Gülen. Targeted in a far reaching witch hunt by the Turkish government, Hizmet has been forced to defend its noble goals of peacebuilding, dialogue, and religious tolerance. Thomas Michel’s book Peace and Dialogue in a Plural Society is a great source to discover these goals.

January 6, 2018

The worsening state of affairs in today’s Turkey is a matter of concern. Only in 2017, 364 women were killed in Turkey. Scores of women—many of them pregnant—were battered, raped, maimed and kidnapped for sexual violence. According to the data from the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, in the last few years, the ratio of women murders has increased more than 200%. By the end of 2017, the torture of women in Turkey exceeded all limits when they were attacked for wearing “un-Islamic” clothing.

January 5, 2018

Amid an ongoing witch-hunt targeting the faith-based Gülen movement, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported that 25,000 reports on the movement were sent to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) in 2017.

January 4, 2018

Journalists Cem Küçük and Fuat Uğur, staunch supporters of Turkish autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called on the government to seize all assets of people linked to the Gülen movement to pay off a fine the US Treasury is expected to impose on Turkish state lender Halkbank for evading Iran sanctions.

January 3, 2018

Turkish government has issued detention warrants for 68 former shareholders closed Islamic lender Bank Asya and detained 49 of them so far on Wednesday over their alleged links to the Gülen movement as part of its massive pos-coup witch hunt targeting the alleged members of the movement.

January 2, 2018

Six months on from the mysterious coup attempt of July 15, the situation in Turkey has become much clearer. Unfortunately, it has also become much darker. In the confusing hours of that terrible night, President Erdogan’s declaration upon landing in Istanbul that, “This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army,” was both enigmatic and foreboding. In the hours that followed, he sought to bring clarity to the confusion by alleging that a previously consistently pacifist civil society movement was in fact a terrorist organization and had been behind the coup attempt. At that moment, Erdogan had the empathy and attention of not just his nation but the global community. No one wants to see a military coup succeed and a democracy toppled – especially not when this democracy represented the hopes of the greater Middle East and entire Muslim world.

January 1, 2018

Turkish Justice Minister Abdülhamit Gül said on Monday that cases against members of the faith-based Gülen movement, which the Turkish government blames for a failed coup in the summer of 2016, would no longer be on Turkey’s agenda.

December 31, 2017

Since the attempted coup of July 15, 2016 the Government of Turkey has engaged in illegal extraterritorial and extrajudicial actions been taking strict measures to silence dissidents in other countries from various ideologies recently.

December 30, 2017

Amid an ongoing witch-hunt targeting the faith-based Gülen movement, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday called on people to not show mercy to the movement, saying the pitiful will be pitied, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

December 28, 2017

Turkish security forces detained a total of 62,402 people in 2017 over alleged links to the Gülen movement, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Wednesday based on data released by the Interior Ministry.

December 27, 2017

The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office on Wednesday stated that 11,480 GSM users were found to have been involuntarily directed to mobile phone application ByLock, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

December 26, 2017

Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Garo Paylan on Wednesday said he has confirmed intelligence that exiled opponents of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan including Alevi and Armenian leaders, journalists and academics will be exposed to assassination or a series of assassinations in Europe, CNNTürk reported.

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